A half-cousin to Charles Darwin, Galton had studied his cousin's theory of evolution. He developed a desired to apply it to humans. Based on his biographical studies, Galton believed that desirable human qualities were hereditary traits. Coupled with the introduction of theories and applications that would later acquire the name "genetics," Galton's theory relied on an ideology of genetic determinism in which human character was due to genes, unaffected by education or living conditions. Darwin strongly disagreed with this elaboration of his theory.
In 1883, one year after Darwin's death, Galton gave his research a name: "eugenics." Throughout its history, eugenics has remained controversial.
Among the first to latch onto the idea of controlling the gene pool of humankind were ultra-wealthy elitists such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford. Writings and quotations attributed to these men point to their purposeful direction of funds into causes and organizations (such as their "Foundations") in which their money could impose serious influence upon the medical, educational, and educational research policies of America's leading universities, think tanks, and institutions (such as public education). These "Captains of Industry" saw eugenics as another means to the shaping of society into a stratified hierarchy in which the largest segment would be the industry-supportive working classes (the new slaves). They purposefully shaped public education, fine-tuning it in order to help create a continuous flow of numb, blindly obedient (fear-based) humans who would be both willing and capable of handling businesses' dirty work. Private education (e.g. boarding schools) and exclusionary social clubs were endowed with the ability to isolate and protect the superior blood lines of an upper class. "Higher education" was then honed to support the steady perpetuation of a number of specialized skill-based "professions" that were deemed necessary to the support and administration of the class system,. These would be occupations such as lawyers and doctors, engineers and accountants. Even "higher education" has, over time, been shaped to continue to ensure and perpetuate the separation of classes: keeping members of the upper-middle class bound to their station through debt (education loans, professional insurance and dues for legal protection, the need to pay and insure a staff of underlings, equipment and its constant need for maintenance and upgrades, etc.) and 'employee' status, while denying access to the intellectually inferior and those unwilling to take financial risk (debt), ensuring the perpetual stream of laborers to fill the increasing number of factory and blue collar jobs.
Originally, eugenics was conceptualized as a means to improve the human species through reproduction: It was posited that the qualities of the human species or a human population could be improved by such means as discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesirable traits (negative eugenics) or encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits (positive eugenics). It did not take long, however, for the development of the extrapolated ideas of both 1) forced, state-mandated sterilization of members of the human population who might possess what are determined as "less desirable" genetic traits and then 2) the active, dedicated and preemptive weeding out or selective thinning of an already-existing population in order to improve its overall "gene pool." In the 20th Century, Germany's Nazi Party's policies of Lebensraum, racial selection, and ethnic cleansing for the purification of an Aryan "master race" were, in fact, coopted from American writings and policies.
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